April 2nd, 2013 by Josh Shaman

Seagate Announces Availability of Desktop HDD 4TB

Seagate annouced that it started shipping the Seagate Desktop HDD 4TB, the industry’s only 4TB, 4 platter desktop hard drive with 1TB on each platter. Designed with home, SOHO, workstations and small businesses in mind, the drive is an update on what was previously called the Seagate Barracuda. Seagate claims that the 4TB Desktop HDD has speeds of up to 146MB/s while still maintaining a 35% power savings compared to competing models. Seagate notes that its latest iteration offers 800,000 times larger capacity than the first desktop drive they offered in 1979, which enables this drive to hold around 1,000,000 songs.

Seagate Desktop HDD 4TB Specifications

Capacity: 4TB

Interface: SATA 6Gb/s

Spindle: 5,900 RPM

Cache: 64MB

Throughput: 146/MBs

Average Latency: 5.1ms

Power

Typical Idle Operating 5W

Average Operating 7.5W

Environmental

Operating Temperature 0° to 60°C

Non-operating Temperature -40° to 70°C

Shock

Operating: Gs (ms) 80 (10ms)

Non-operating: Gs (ms) 300 (2ms)

Acoustics (bels - sound power)

Idle: 2.3

Opeating: 2.8

Dimensions (LxWxH): 146.99mm x 101.60mm x 26.11mm

Weight: 610g

Seagate incorporates two specific technologies to increase the density of the Desktop HDD 4TB while still enabling it to produce strong performance. Starting with Seagate AcuTrac, the Desktop HDD uses this technology to enable accurate reads and writes to tracks that only span 75nm wide. Seagate also uses OptiCache technology which it claimes increases performance up to 45%. OptiCache accesses the 64MB of onboard cache to meet this claimed performance.

Seagate Desktop HDDs are designed to be easy for new users to incorporate while offering some green features to reduce required energy as well. Transitioning to a new Desktop HDD 4TB, even for users operating older versions of Windows, is hassle-free. Users operating Windows XP are typically limited to 2TB drives without updating from the native BIOS to UEFI. However, Seagate users can utilize the standard BIOS and still access the full 4TB using Seagate's free DiscWizard software. The Seagate Desktop HDD 4TB is also designed to be more energy efficient in idle operating states using only 5W of power. The drives also incorporate at least 70% or more recyclable materials in building the Desktop HDDs.